Midland couple revel in patriotism, serving community, country

Published 6:08 am, Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Andy and Betty Shaffer, next to the USS Constitution he built by hand. Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram

Andy and Betty Shaffer, next to the USS Constitution he built by hand. Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram

Photo: Tim Fischer

Midland couple revel in patriotism, serving community, country

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Andy and Betty Shaffer get along fabulously well, a most happy couple. They appreciate togetherness, value the courtesy of compromise and exemplarily serve their beloved country and community.

They are a faithful team, a fortress of patriotism and history.

“The way we operate is the direct line to our Army years,” said Betty, a former United States Army nurse who was prepared to serve overseas in the Gulf War even after her husband, a decorated Army cavalry officer in the Vietnam War and a 1968 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, had left the active military. “You are always on a team, watching out for your other soldiers. You are watching out for each other.”

On a grand stage, they are on a patriotic team, albeit diverse, that hurrahs America on Independence Day.

Enlivened with gratitude and enriched with ennobling patriotism, Andy and Betty are bound by ethics and graced with free will to celebrate and to uphold freedom and liberty every day, and especially on America’s Independence Day.

“The Fourth of July is the date of the birth of a nation” and represents “a concept in government and a concept in liberty” that are “still unique,” Andy, a community volunteer and retired engineer, said of America and its vast freedoms and opportunities in a world plagued by injustice, oppression, poverty and tyranny.

“It is the day when ragtag patriots and men of vision gave birth to a whole new way of life” under the concepts, eloquently penned by Thomas Jefferson in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“It is a day to celebrate our independence as Betty and I like to do, to give back to our community all year long simply because we enjoy it,” Andy said of volunteerism as America draws nigh to the 237th anniversary of Independence Day. “We are free to do it.”

Andy served or has served on more than a dozen Midland boards ranging from the Midland County Public Library’s Advisory Board and the Midland County Public Library Foundation’s Board to the Community and Senior Services and United Way of Midland.

“You can’t just be a taker,” he said. “You have to give.”

Nurturing his “fascination with square-rigged sailing ships,” Andy meticulously builds scale models of vessels, including the three-masted frigate USS Constitution, which President George Washington ordered in 1794 and which was launched in 1797. The restored historic ship, nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” fought in the War of 1812.

“The wood in her keel was growing before the Revolution took place,” Andy said of the foundation of the ship. “That ship represents our written Constitution” and is a “tangible link back to the people who actually wrote the Constitution” in 1787.

Avid cyclists, the Shaffer couple likely will begin Independence Day at sunrise with an invigorating bicycle ride, possibly pedaling 30 to 50 miles, and then cooking hamburgers. They plan to watch the historically accurate 1993 film “Gettysburg” about the July 1-3, 1863, American Civil War battle 150 years ago that was a “turning-point in the war and a turning-point in our country” that helped preserve the Union, said Betty, an American Civil War historian who earned a degree in history at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) before she studied nursing.

“The Fourth of July is always the day that Andy and I stop and realize how fortunate we are to live here (in America),” Betty said. Referring to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” Betty said without the “vision and courage of Abraham Lincoln, we probably would not have survived as a nation.”

She recalled their recent visit to Europe in reflecting over World War II.

“It is so moving to walk into the American cemetery at Normandy. You can see Omaha Beach. It is so peaceful now. Then you look out over, literally, a sea of white marble crosses and Stars of David. Every one of them is facing home” — across the Atlantic Ocean to America. “They didn’t get to come home ... to raise a family and grow old.”

Andy’s father, C.J. Shaffer, a disciplinarian and a “soldier’s soldier” who was attached to the U.S. Army’s 30th (Old Hickory) Division, participated in the June 1944 Normandy Invasion and in the Battle of the Bulge. Twice wounded, he received the Silver Star for valor for disabling a German tank with his pistol and a hand-grenade.

“Betty’s grandfather, Robert Dorn, was a World War I ambulance driver in France and in World War II became a naval radio repairman. He was a pixie, a gentleman, a true Texan, a craftsman and hell-raiser,” Andy said, tenderly. “I cried when he died.”

Betty’s grand-aunt Lois was a World War II nurse.

Betty and Andy are “really blessed to serve as admissions representatives for the West Point academy,” Betty said. “We met absolutely the best kids that our country has. As long as we have these young people who really understand service and understand that you have to give back to your nation, then we are going to be OK. The kids have a sense of duty, a calling.”

Betty, who enjoys writing, seemed amused to report that a West Point admissions officer told her, “You can say in 20 words what most people say in five.”

A cuddler who has “always loved animals,” Betty is a volunteer with the Midland Humane Coalition in seeking homes for adoptable dogs and cats.

“A person who values the life of an animal values life,” Betty affirmed.

Andy and Betty Shaffer vividly recalled their first date, a blind and sweetly enlightening one, at West Point in 1966. Her sister, a schoolteacher engaged to Andy’s roommate, set up the date.

There he was, a handsome, trim and fit 6-footer at age 20, dressed to the hilt in his United States Military Academy’s dress gray uniform, “a chick magnet,” as Betty Brashaer, an 18-year-old high-school graduate out of Texas, would recall.

And there she was, “cute and personable” at 5-foot-3 and, as he would learn in their courtship and confirmed throughout their 43-year marriage, a person of “enduring intelligence and compassion, inner-strength and beauty.”

She is, he declared, his conscience and is “constantly guiding me, helping me be effective. I am involved in a lot of stuff but, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t do it without my conscience.”

Over the years, Betty would be enamored by his charm and exactitude and especially as “the most ethical person I have ever met. He does not know how to tell a lie,” a discipline enforced in his upbringing by his disciplinarian father, a career Army officer, and by the West Point Cadet Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.”

“I live by that today,” Andy said.

And the valediction in closing his mailed messages comes from the Cadet Prayer: “Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”